


no promises

by ottermo



Series: As Prompted [78]
Category: Humans (TV)
Genre: Fix-It, Gen, Karen’s Alive, because of course she is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-24
Updated: 2018-07-24
Packaged: 2019-06-15 18:54:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15419406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ottermo/pseuds/ottermo
Summary: Leo and Karen have their second conversation. It’s long overdue.





	no promises

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Synth Recharge Challenge prompt: “Let me make it up to you.”

The thirteen-hour countdown comes to an end sometime after one in the morning, the alarm chirruping merrily from his newly-borrowed phone.

Leo knows it would be far more sensible to wait for a more earthly hour, when Mattie or at least someone else will be around, but he has never been very good at being patient. He sits up straight, nursing the stiff muscles in his neck and wishing he hadn’t fallen asleep in a dining-room chair.

It’s dark, so he swaps the phone’s alarm function for its torch; steals a look at Karen’s face in the circle of yellowish light. The skinpacks on her face have fused seamlessly - she no longer seems like the victim of a beating. She looks like she is sleeping.

Or dead.

He taps the space bar of Mattie’s laptop, waking it up. The deep scan has not reported any major faults. He tries to tell himself that it doesn’t mean anything; there isn’t software to measure faults in consciousness. What would they check for? Even so, he can’t help hoping.

With a gentle tug on the cord, he pulls the charger out of Karen’s side, smoothing the flap of skin back over the port. He stands up, crosses to the light switch, then takes a long look at her: just in case this is his last chance to see her and feel hopeful. In case what he’s about to do confirms that it was all for nothing.

 _Enough now,_ he chides himself. _Do it._

He goes back, leans down and chintaps the woman who was created to be his mother - a light movement, belying how momentous it is. There’s no startup sound, of course. As with her deep brown eyes, she has always been missing certain hallmarks of the commercial synth model. She’s home-made. Unique even among the uniques - which makes her status as a doppelgänger all the more ironic.

Leo holds his breath, keeps it there even when her eyes open.

“Hello,” he whispers.

Slowly, Karen sits up, her face slowly becoming animated again with a hint of a frown.

“I’m on a table,” she says.

The bluntness of her statement tickles him, but he can’t bring himself to laugh, in case it’s an indicator that her head isn’t functioning properly. She’s right, though, in fairness. With the bedrooms at full capacity, the table had been the next best option, as far as flat surfaces went.

Leo had wondered briefly if a Hawkins dining-room table was really a Hawkins dining-room table if it hadn’t, at some point, had a member of his family stretched out on top of it, close to death.

“Where am I?” she asks. “And don’t say ‘on a table’.”

This time he grins. “You’re at…”

He almost says _Mattie’s_ , because that’s still what this house means to him first and foremost, but he realises Karen has no reason to recognise that name.

“Joe’s…wife’s house,” he finishes lamely. “You’re safe.”

“Joe?” Karen echoes, and faintly Leo registers a sinking feeling: she’s forgotten, they’ve lost part of her they’ll never get back…

Then her brow softens. “I told Sam to find him.”

“Sam’s fine,” Leo says quickly, before she has a chance to worry about it. “He’s upstairs. Charging in Sophie’s room.”

“Joe’s little girl?” Karen asks.

“Yeah. They’re the best of friends already.”

She smiles, but it doesn’t quite reach her eyes.

Leo sits back down in his chair, looks up at her. “Do you remember how…?”

“Yes. I’m trying not to think about it.”

Fair enough, he thinks. It’s not as if he’s chosen to dwell on his own near-death experience all that much, in the days since his awakening.

She changes the subject deftly, if not subtly. “So what are _you_ doing at Joe’s wife’s house?”

He considers the question. It’s a good one. Somehow he doesn’t want to lead with ‘Joe’s other daughter, mostly’.

“I had nowhere else to go,” he admits. “Things were getting a bit heated in the compound.”

She seems to find this amusing. “You were in a synth compound?”

“Yes.”

“And I was in a humans-only settlement.”

Leo hums in acknowledgement of the parallel. “And now we’re both here.”

“Yes.”

She cranes her neck to look out of the window. The moonlit street is empty, quiet.

“Sam and I will leave when it’s light,” she says.

“No,” he says, on impulse. Then, a little softer, “I mean, you don’t have to. They’re good people.”

“It’s dangerous for Sam, out here.”

“It’s dangerous for _you,_ back there.”

She accepts it. “There are plenty of other synth-free places. We can’t stay outside one for long. Qualia are still looking for him.”

Leo is impressed by her bravery: less than a day after being beaten to death by humans who can’t abide synthetics, she is willing to live among them again, for the sake of her surrogate son. She would do anything for him.

It reminds him of Mia.

He remembers making that comparison once before. That time he’d been the one on a table, if memory serves correctly.

“Just don’t leave straight away,” he pleads. “Think about it.”

For the first time she looks at him - really looks at him, eyes locking on his. Leo tries to stare back, to fight against the human inclination to recoil from someone who looks so much like a ghost. She looks more like his mother now than when he’d last seen her: she looks exactly as she had on that very first day, presented to them all as Beatrice.

Why had she done that? Why had her default idea for a disguise been hair that length, that shade?

“Stop,” says Karen, softly.

“What?”

“You’re thinking about her,” she says.

He glances away, guilty. “I can’t help it.”

“I know.”

It’s not accusatory; none of it is. She just sounds sad.

“That’s why we can’t stay. I can’t be her.”

“I know,” he says, looking back at her. “I’m sorry. If it’s any consolation, my memories of her are fading now.”

She blinks. “But your synthetic component…”

“It’s gone.”

She raises her eyebrows. “How did _that_ happen?”

“I got on the wrong side of a synth who really liked sharp edges.”

Something crosses her face briefly, but she doesn’t voice it.

“Funny, isn’t it,” she says instead. “We barely know each other, but we think we ought to. We think we matter to each other.”

“You matter to me,” he says quietly.

He doesn’t much mind if it isn’t true in reverse. He’s glad he got to say it.

“We let you down,” he continues. “But you’ve always been one of us.” He swallows, his throat still dry from his half-night’s sleep. “Let me make it up to you, somehow.”

“You already have,” she tells him. “You brought me back to life.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know,” she says, “But it’s enough.”

She twists, turning so that her legs are hanging off the side of the table. She is all parallel lines, her bare feet completely still.

“Can’t we just… try?” Leo asks, after a moment’s silence.

She turns her head, and slides her hand closer to his. He takes it, holds it gingerly, aware that only hours ago Mattie had had to replace part of the wrist joint. His own hand shakes ever so slightly, as it’s been doing intermittently whenever he asks his muscles to do something they’ve forgotten. What a pair they make. Both of them so recently broken, so recently dancing on the edge of their separate mortalities.

“You have a tremor,” she notes.

“I’ve been in a coma,” he counters. “It happens.”

Leo feels the pressure on his hand increase slightly, as she gives it a delicate squeeze. He has no clear enough memory of his mother’s hands to compare it with. This is Karen. Only her.

“We can try,” she says. “No promises.”

“No promises,” he agrees, and squeezes back.

••

 


End file.
